Tag Archives: 七転び八起き

It had actually been coming for awhile— ‘life’ was speeding up and the daily check-in with Duolingo was becoming more of an “oh yeah~ I almost forgot!”. First I changed my daily commitment to a lower number to minimize the time needed to maintain the streak— then, I ‘froze’ my streak a couple of times (i.e. the system showed that my streak was still intact, when I had, in fact, missed a day) by exchanging some of my system credits (just free gems/etc. that I’d picked up through engaging with the platform); today, however, the inevitable happened and I realized that I hadn’t even been on the system for two days [sigh]–the picture below is how Duolingo greeted me.

It’s all good– I was preoccupied with real things, so I don’t need to feel bad about dropping the ball. I don’t think I’ll take them up on their offer to repair my streak for a fee ($9.99), but I think take it as an opportunity to pause and see whether I’m going to try and get back on the horse, or try something different. I like the Duolingo platform—-I think for my learning style though, it can’t be the engine that maintains or sustains my connection to the language. I’ll just have to think about where it fits in the ecosystem.

As for the streak– I’ve been at this game long enough to know that, in the long run, the key skill that keeps you moving forward is being able to pick yourself up again after you inevitably stumble. As the Japanese proverb says— “Fall down seven times, get up eight times” (七転び八起き)